Early Intervention for Preschoolers

• Early Intervention Can Change a Life
Early Intervention is a free, national program to help children under age 3 who have developmental delays and disabilities.

Diagnostic Labels

• DSM vs. Biopsychosocial Formulation
The combination of predisposing, precipitating, perpetuating and protective factors will be different for everyone. If a diagnosis is a stamp, a formulation is more like a fingerprint, unique to each individual.

Parent-Child Mental Health

• Engaging Families From the Start
A toddler's troubling behaviors can be understood as difficulties managing both his/her body and developing mind in a social context––consisting initially of parent-child. Helping these families means intensive support from the very beginning.

Hold Your Horses

• Individualized Equine Therapy
HYH is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving quality of life and wellness for people with disabilities. The multidisciplinary team includes board certified physical, occupational, speech and psychotherapy professionals, as well as a team of therapy aides and equine professionals...AND horses.

 

Understanding Behaviors

• When Children Pantomime
Children’s behavior is a form of communication. Behavior management therapies and medication primarily serve to silence that communication.

Equating Physical and Mental Illness

• Is It Useful or Accurate
Perhaps rather than equating mental illness with physical illness, we need to recognize that all suffering has some emotional basis, and that relationships are central to all healing.

Early Childhood Mental Health

• Helping Young Children
“Early childhood mental health consultant” evokes an image of a toddler on a couch talking to a therapist. In fact, the work focuses on helping adults to create healthy environments.

Relationship in Therapy

• Facilitating Parent and Child Reunion

Child mental health is about relationships, as is therapy. Happy Valentine's Day.

Redefining Mental Illness

• A New Approach
New approaches recognize that mental illnesses are complex individual responses, not  sharp, clear categories defining those who are sick and those who were well.

Parenting Special Needs Children

• Training Parents

Six weeks of training in simple techniques led to significant reductions in stress, depression and anxiety among adults parenting a child with severe developmental disabilities.

Self-Calming

• Rehabilitating After Early Trauma

Without appropriate adult support, childhood trauma can interfere with healthy brain development, inhibiting children’s ability to make good decisions, use memory or use sequential thought processes to work through problems.

Mental Health vs. Behavior Control

• Psychotropic Drugs & Children
Treating children with psychiatric drugs with no other form of treatment precludes understanding children living in poverty, especially those in foster care, and the significant contributing factors of early trauma and loss.

Dysregulated Mood

• Calming the Dysregulated Child
Dr Claudia Gold discusses a non-pharmacological treatment of problems of regulation of emotion, behavior, and attention.

Behavior Problems

• Understanding vs. Medicating
To help children with "behavior problems," it is essential to listen to their parents....the behavior is a symptom, perhaps even an adaptive response, to the underlying problem.

Courthouse Dogs

• Meeting emotional needs, one dog at a time
Specially trained facility dogs assist children with physical, psychological or emotional trauma while in the court system.

ADHD Real or Not?

• Is ADHD a Real Disorder?
Here is a thoughtful discussion by Claudia Gold, M.D.

Local Therapeutic Riding

• We Can Ride is a local and widely respected organization offering therapeutic horseback riding to adults and children living with disabilities.

Therapy Horses

• Horse Boy World
Dressage Today article on using horses and dressage to help autistic children.

Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder

• New DSM V Category
It is really describing a mutually regulating or dysregulating relationship between parent and child.

What's Wrong With My Child?

• Wrong Question
Dr. Claudia Gold says don't ask “what is the disorder?” but rather, “what is the experience of this particular child and family and what can we do to move things in a better direction?”